Sesame Street Is One Of The Only TV Shows That Is Actually Good For Kids

Television has a bad side. According to a report from the
University of Michigan, the average American
child has seen 16,000 murders on TV by age 18.

Indeed,
programs explicitly designed for kids often contain more
violence than adult programming, and that violence is often
paired with humor.

Every single animated feature film produced by US production
houses between 1937 and 1999 contained violence, and the amount
of violence increased throughout that time period.

Researchers from the University of Michigan found that just being
awake and in the room with a TV on more than two hours a day —
even if the kids aren’t explicitly paying attention to the TV —
was a risk factor for being overweight at ages three and
four-and-a-half.

This may be related to the fact that two thirds of the 20,000
television commercials the average child sees each year are for
food.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, in their wisdom, recommend that children under age two have
zero hours of screen time. (Meanwhile, a bevy of DVDs
are marketed to parents of children age zero to 2, promising to “teach your child about language and
logic, patterns and sequencing, analyzing details and more.”)

Despite the warning, however, many parents of infants age 0 to 2
do allow their children some screen time. In 2007, Frederick J.
Zimmerman of the University of Washington (now at UCLA) wondered what the effects of TV watching were
on those infants. He collected data from 1008 parents about the
infants’ TV habits, as well as the amount of time they spent
doing things like reading (with parents), playing, and so on. He
also administered, for each child, a survey called the
MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory
(CDI).

The CDI is a standard tool used by developmental psychologists to
assess language development in infants and children. He and his
team then looked to see if there were statistical relationships
between time spent watching TV (and the other activities) and
language abilities, as measured by the CDI. Here’s the catch:
they only included infants whose TV watching consisted
entirely of infant-directed programming. That is, TV
programs especially designed for infants age 0 to 2. If the
infants were shown other sorts of TV programs, they were not
included in the study.

They found that reading at least once a day was associated with a
seven point increase on the CDI for 8 to 16 month olds, and
nearly twelve points for 17 to 24 month olds, compared with those
who read with their parents less frequently. If parents told
stories to their children at least once per day, as opposed to
less frequently, their kids’ scores on the CDI were nearly six
and a half points higher for younger infants, and more than seven
points higher for older infants. That kids who read more often or
were told stories more often scored better on a test of language
development is probably not surprising. (Interestingly, there was
no statistical correlation between music listening and language
development).

Here’s the kicker: for each hour, on average, that infants
between 8 and 16 months old watched infant-directed television
(including DVD versions of those programs) per day, they could
expect a seventeen point reduction in their scores on the CDI.
Let me say that again: each hour per day, on average, that these
kids watched TV was associated with a seventeen point decrease on
a measure of language acquisition.

You might argue that this correlation could exist simply because
parents who show these programs to their kids may also be somehow
less motivated to encourage language development in their kids
more generally. Perhaps these parents were just less skilled at
parenting overall. The researchers attempted to statistically
control for this, by factoring in data related to parent-child
interaction.

As usual, correlations should be taken with a grain of salt, and
this is but one study from a very large literature. Still, this
study, combined with others, has led the American Academy of
Pediatrics to recommend that children between the ages of 0 and 2
years old watch no television at all.

But television isn’t all bad. Shows like Sesame Street
and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood stand out as beacons of
hope, sparkling diamonds among a sea of coals. For children
between the ages of two and five years, at least.

In 2001, Daniel R. Anderson published the results of a
massive longitudinal study called “The Recontact Study” as a
Monograph of the Society of Research in Child
Development. First, they assessed television habits among
preschoolers (age 2-5). Then they recontacted 570 of the children
a decade later, when they were in high school. They assessed
their current (adolescent) media use, and also their grades in
English, science, and math, their leisure reading habits,
creativity, aggression, participation in extracurricular
activities, use of alcohol and cigarettes, and self-image.

They found, among other things, that children age 3 to 5 who
watched Sesame Street had larger vocabularies in high
school than those who watched other television programming, or
even no television at all. The effect could not be explained by
gender, family size, or parents’ education. Preschoolers from
lower income neighborhoods, in particular, who watched Sesame
Street were more prepared for school than their peers who
did not watch Sesame Street.

Kids who watched Sesame Street had higher grades in
science and English, had higher total GPA, read more books,
placed more value on achievement, and were rated as more
creative, compared with their peers. Boys who watched Sesame
Street in preschool were rated as less aggressive in high
school; girls were more likely to participate in extracurricular
art classes.

Similar effects were seen for those who watched Mister
Rogers as kids, but not for those who watched other
non-educational television programs in preschool.

Importantly, it was the educational content of the television
that kids watched in preschool that predicted their future
success as high schoolers more than the overall amount of
television they watched. “The medium of television is not
homogeneous or monolithic, and content viewed is more important
than raw amount,” Anderson says. “The medium is not the message:
The message is.”

Reed Larson put it plainly in a commentary on
Anderson’s monograph: “Educational television works: It has
sustained, long-term, positive relationships to development and
behavior.”